Gellish English

Gellish English is a variant of Gellish and is a formal language, which means that it is structured and formalised subset of natural English that is computer interpretable. Its definition includes an English dictionary of concepts that is arranged in a taxonomy and that is extended into an ontology. From an information technology perspective Gellish English is a standard data model for information modelling and for knowledge representation. It is a data exchange language for the Semantic Web and can be used as a successor of electronic data interchange technologies. In principle, for every natural language there is a variant that is specific for that language. For example, Gellish Dutch (Gellish Nederlands), Gellish Italien, etc.

Gellish is intended for the expression of complete and unambiguous specifications of products, facilities and processes, suitable to specify, buy, fabricate, install, operate and maintain such objects and to exchange such information in a system independent and computer interpretable way or to integrate such data from different sources.

Gellish English has basically an object-relation-object (ORO) structure and therefore it includes a large number of standard relation types, which define a semantically rich expression capability. The Gellish English Dictionary-Taxonomy is extended with a knowledge base with basic engineering knowledge. That knowledge base is itself expressed in Gellish English. The dictionary with definitions of the concepts in Gellish English can be used for various purposes. For example as standard terminology to harmonize data in various computer systems, for selection of classes for classification or as a basis for searching information with a search engine. The Gellish Dictionary also defines the standardrelation types that enable to create computer interpretable Gellish English expressions.

Gellish English is typically expressed in the form of standard Data Tables for Gellish Databases or standard Message Tables. A Gellish Data Table is a standard table that is suitable to represent any expression in the Gellish language. Its table columns are standardized. The tables can be used as a database or as an exchange file. Gellish Data Tables can be implemented in any tabular format. For example, it can be implemented as SQL database tables, as XML data stores, as STEPfiles (according to ISO 10303-21), or as one or more simple spreadsheet tables. Gellish English is defined in the Gellish English Dictionary-Taxonomy, earlier called STEPlib, together with the specification document 'Definition of Gellish Databases and Exchange Messages'. The Gellish Dictionary-Taxonomy itself is also expressed as a Gellish Data Table.

References

Gellish documentation is for free available under ‘open source’ conditions via [1] and from the SourceForge project [2]). This includes among others the Gellish English Dictionary-Taxonomy and the definition of Gellish Data Tables. For a definition of ‘open source' see [3]).

• Van Renssen, A.. Gellish: A Generic Extensible Ontological Language. Delft University Press. ISBN 90-407-2597-7. . A pdf version is available via [4]